Modeling Animated Movie Characters

We watched a video of an expert at Pixar showing how we used mathematical modeling and concepts from physics (such as weights and gravitational pulls) to create animated characters that we all love and then add nuance to them (such as inflection of the nose, a rumpling of the t-shirt etc.). The video can be found here:

While this was out of the scope of this project, we were inspired to take some of our favorite animated characters (from mainly, Christmas movies) and use Mathematica to model them. We used polar coordinates, parametric equations, linear functions and Mathematica commands to model Zero (from The Nightmare Before Christmas), Olaf (from Frozen) and Mumble (from Happy Feet!). We also made use of a lot of the resources from the lab work we did during the semester to manipulate these functions such that we had created a coherent 3D character.

About The Author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *